Systems for access control are used, for example, at cable railways and ski lifts. Especially for winter sports, day, week, and season passes and similar long-term entitlements are issued in addition to single-trip tickets, often for a multiplicity of cable railways and ski lifts that are present within entire regions. Considerable price reductions are granted for the longer-term access authorizations compared with individual trips, but these are not transferable to other users.
The unauthorized transfer of longer-term passes is, however, a widespread practice. It often happens, for example, that a skier who has bought a day pass early in the morning stops skiing around midday and then hands on the pass to a friend, or perhaps even to a stranger, e.g. in the parking lot. Lift operators incur considerable financial losses as a result of this practice. In order to prevent such transfers, an identification photo of the purchaser is therefore taken and affixed to the pass when it is purchased, so that the official can compare the photo on the pass with the person who is using it. Processing the photos and affixing them to the passes is costly and time-consuming, however, so that this is feasible only for higher-value passes, such as weekly or seasonal passes.
Also well known is the technique of storing a digitized picture of the purchaser of the pass, along with the identification details for the particular pass, in a database, and providing a device with a display screen at the point of access, to which the picture of the passholder is transmitted from the database upon input of the identification details on the pass by the official and displayed on the screen, whereby the official can compare the access user with the image on the screen. However, this method of checking is time-consuming.